She glanced over at Shelton, still deep in conversation. “What the hell,” she said, and she knocked the gimlet back in a gulp and slid off the stool. “Lead on, MacDuff.”
I laid down some money on the bar, and Gleason shook his head at me with a very grim look on his face.
We were halfway to the door when Shelton noticed us.
“Hey,” he shouted. “Mildred.”
“I’m tired of waiting, Larry, and this nice young gentleman offered me a ride home. Wasn’t that kind of him?”
Larry Shelton looked at me without much pleasure. “You look like a boy doesn’t understand what ‘stay the hell away’ means.”
“You said to stay away until I was twenty-one. Today’s my birthday.”
He softened a little. “Well, why didn’t you say so?” Grinning, he showed off a gap between his front teeth that made Floyd’s look like an orthodontist’s masterwork, and he stuck out his hand for me to shake. “Come on over here and I’ll buy you a drink for your birthday.”
I thought for a second, stupidly, that I’d pulled one over on him, and approached him with my hand extended. The man with the snappy suit watched the transaction with bored disinterest, impatient to resume his conversation with Shelton and annoyed at the distraction.
When I was three feet away from Shelton, he grabbed his own drink from the bar and threw it in my face. I stood for a moment, humiliated, with bourbon running down my face and dripping off my chin as he and his friend cracked up laughing.
“You were about to offer the lady a ride home on your bike, junior?” the man in the suit said.
“Come on, Mildred,” I said, turning to face her, but she wasn’t there. She was leaning against the bar in hysterics, laughing so hard that no sound was coming out, doubled over with her hands resting on her shapely knees. Tears rolled down her cheeks, streaming kohl in their wake as they had yesterday, and my first urge was to throw my fist at her jaw. Instead I put the slug onto Shelton, and I got him so fast he went down with the first blow to the midriff. Mildred was still laughing, and so was the man in the suit. I gave Shelton a kick to the ribs and another to the belly that knocked the breath clear out of him, and I grabbed my own unfinished drink from the bar. I poured it into his hair and rubbed it in with my hand like scalp tonic.
Everybody was laughing but me and Shelton, and I wanted to, God knows. Gleason stood behind the bar making a valiant effort to keep a straight face, but his eyes shone with joy.
“All right, boy,” the man in the suit said. “You’ve had some fun, now it’s time to run along.” He was still smiling, but he said it like he meant it.
My honor was restored, and I was happy to go now. “Come on, Mildred,” I said.
“Huh-uh. Mildred’s not going.”
I almost made a smart remark, but Mildred was back on her bar-stool now, wiping the smeared makeup off her cheeks with a wet bar rag, facing the bar and studiously pretending I wasn’t there.
“You with them or with me, Mildred?”
She turned around. “You’re a dear sweet boy, Wayne, but tonight’s kind of a grown-up night for me, if you don’t mind. I’ll see you some other time.”
“You hear that, Wayne? Now scram.”
It was crazy, but at that moment I wanted Mildred more than I had ever wanted any woman before, more than I had ever desired anything in my whole life. I wanted to fuck her, run away with her, marry her, raise a family. I didn’t care that she was a lush and a slattern, that she was nearly twenty years older than me, or that she had dropped me for the first prosperous swinging dick that came through the barroom door. I wanted her right then and there, and I took her by the arm.
“Mildred, let’s go.” I had hoped to keep the pleading tone out of my voice, but I heard it just like everyone else did, high-pitched and boyish.
“Mildred, let’s go,” the man in the suit mocked in a voice like Mickey Mouse’s that deepened to a growl. “Let go of her arm or I’ll break yours.”
“Screw you, Charlie,” I said.
“The name’s Stan Gerard, and I own this place.” He stood up and moved toward me, and with no more telegraphing than I’d given Shelton he backhanded me across the face, and then he pulled something metallic out of his pocket and hit me with it, hard, and I closed my eyes for a second. Crazy colors floated before me, and another blow caught me on the ear as I went down. I never quite lost consciousness, but somehow I couldn’t open my eyes as they carried me through the bar to the rear and tossed me into the back alley.
“Don’t hurt him too bad,” I heard my beloved call languidly from her perch at the bar.
I hit the pavement, hard, and Stan Gerard spoke to me in a polite way before he went back inside.
“Can you hear me, Wayne?”
I indicated that I could.
“Like Shelton said, come back when you’re twenty-one. I’ll even buy you a drink. But not before then, got me?”
I nodded once again, and the door closed. I opened my eyes and looked around. It was getting dark, and I limped around to the side alley and made my way to the street, where my Hudson sat parked a stone’s throw from Stan Gerard’s Duesenberg.
Idiot, I told myself as I sat there pulling the starter again and again with no result. You’ve been running all over town, covering twice as much ground as you normally would have, and you didn’t stop for gas. With my cheekbone throbbing, I got out and started the humiliating six-block walk to my house and my bicycle.
5. In Which I Accept My Status, for Now
I couldn’t find my old man’s gas can, so I took a milk bottle in a wire basket from the back porch. As I climbed onto my bike with it I had an idea. I went back to the porch and took a second bottle, and then I rode over to the Skelly station on Hillside.
“Ain’t putting gas in there, not in a glass bottle.” The Skelly man shook his head firmly, letting it stop at the far end of each shake.
“I’ll put it in myself.”
“Nuh-uh. You take this metal can or nothing. Cost you a nickel extra for deposit, but you can get it back.”
Though the evening had cooled considerably, the asphalt beneath our feet still felt warmer than it should have, and the whole station smelled like gas, seeping up through the asphalt and past my nostrils to lodge in the spongy repository of my sinus, where it would slowly leak into my brain for the rest of the night if I didn’t get away. I could feel the fumes building up there, thick and nauseating behind my eyes, and I broke.
“Okay, put it in the can,” I said.
The Skelly man got up off of his chair and took the can over to the pump. He filled the can and I paid him and rode along the sidewalks back to the Royal Crown. I put the bicycle and the basket with the milk bottles into the rear seat of the Hudson and put some of the gasoline in the tank, and a little slug into the carburator. There was about a quart of it left, and I left it in the can on the seat next to me.
I headed one block east on Douglas and turned left over to First, where I parked in front of a two-story duplex. I got the bike and one of the milk bottles out of the back seat and filled the milk bottle with the can of gas. From the glove compartment I extracted Mildred’s purloined drawers, drenching them in the gasoline and stuffing them into the mouth of the bottle. I hopped back onto the bike and rode back to Douglas and, from the safety of a large coniferous shrub outside the Hillcrest apartment building, cased the front of the Royal Crown. The sidewalk was empty, and I pulled out my lighter and went for broke, coasting down the sidewalk with one hand on the handlebars and the other around the bottle. When I got to the Duesenberg, I stopped and propped the bike up on one leg as I flicked the lighter and lit Mildred’s gasoline-soaked intimates. They burned bright for a second and in a single action I threw the bottle at the dashboard and kicked the pedals into motion, hearing with no small satisfaction the breaking of the bottle and the whooshing sound of the fire erupting from the interior of the Duesie. I didn’t look back, but I could feel the heat at my back, and the sidewalk before me glowed yellow in a way it hadn’t a second before.